After undergoing a relative eclipse as a cultural force in the decades following World War II, the Bible is making a comeback in American culture, though more as an academic movement than a grassroots phenomenon. Bill Moyers's pbs discussion group on Genesis became a media event. Time magazine was so bold as to speak of an "unmistakable Genesis revival in American culture."

We must not overstate the extent of the revival. There was a time when the Bible was the central text of English and American culture, permeating its civil institutions, law, morality, and artistic expression. By contrast, the current scholarly ferment about the Bible is a coterie phenomenon. It is not on the verge of making the Bible the pervasive presence in American society that it once was.

C. S. Lewis, musing on the likely fate of the Bible after a majority of people have ceased to accept it as an inspired religious book, predicted that it would continue as a force in two spheres—in the specialist's study and among the believing minority who read it to be instructed. My focus in this article is on what is happening in the scholarly forum, with spillover effect at the local secular bookstore (though not at the community Christian bookstore). The chief importance of what is happening will be its eventual impact (or lack of it) on how the Bible is viewed by the segment of society that in the past has obeyed and believed the Bible as a sacred book.

The renewed prominence of the Bible in the academy has been mainly a literary phenomenon. Literary approaches to the Bible have become a fashion and even a fad among both literary critics and biblical scholars. The Bible is now part of the canon of works taught by professors in departments of English and comparative literature. Several years ago the president of the Modern Language Association claimed that all the needs of a core curriculum in literature could be accomplished through the teaching of just one text—the Bible.

Publishers include books on the Bible in their literature catalogs. Specimen book titles from scholarly presses include Literary Criticism and the Gospels; Reading the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory; The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory; and The Literary Guide to the Bible. In the initial exuberance of the Bible-as-literature movement in the early sixties, Northrop Frye advocated the view that "the Bible forms the lowest stratum in the teaching of literature. It should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind where everything that comes along later can settle on it. … The Bible … should be the basis of literary training." While Frye's vision was never fully realized, in a modified sense it has been fulfilled.

The growth of interest in literary approaches to the Bible has been even more dramatic among biblical scholars. Book titles and subtitles tell the story: Matthew As Story; Irony in the Fourth Gospel; Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel; The Literary Genre of the Acts of the Apostles. Indeed, literary terms are often smuggled into book titles where their presence seems gratuitous: Call to Discipleship: A Literary Study of Mark's Gospel; The Christocentric Literary Structure of the Fourth Gospel; Revelation in the Fourth Gospel: Narrative Mode and Theological Claim. Even more telling than all of this are the blurbs that publishers put into their catalogs and on book covers. It is no exaggeration to say that publishers are falling over themselves to claim a stake in the brave new world of literary approaches to the Bible. Several presses now have Bible-as-literature series (e.g., Indiana University and Westminster John Knox), and Sheffield Press in England has made a virtual industry out of literary studies of the Old Testament.

At least four main strands may be discerned in current literary approaches to the Bible. One is the prominence of the Bible-as-literature in "cutting-edge" discussions of the theory of interpretation in both literary and biblical studies. A second is actual commentary on the Bible, which increasingly shows an interest and even preoccupation with literary aspects of the text under discussion. From a different angle, contemporary imaginative writers, sensing that readers want to take a fresh look at the Bible, are turning to biblical materials as they ply their art. Finally, all of this ferment has prompted anthologizers to look again at the long history of biblical presence in the Western literary tradition. No landmark books dominate the landscape I have sketched, and the specimens I have selected should be viewed as representative rather than definitive.

The Postmodern Bible

A road map to current literary approaches in the nonevangelical academy is ready at hand. It is entitled The Postmodern Bible: The Bible and Culture Collective. Authored jointly by a group of ten scholars, it is a genuinely collaborative effort produced by a committee, not an anthology of essays by individual authors. While this novel venture is unlikely to initiate widescale imitation, it is a fact that a number of literary studies of the Bible are jointly authored projects, including The Literary Guide to the Bible (1987), edited by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, and A Complete Literary Guide to the Bible (1993), edited by Leland Ryken and Tremper Longman III. Although The Postmodern Bible is an anomaly in eschewing to label itself a literary approach at a time when many authors and publishers advertise their approaches as literary even when they are not, the approaches covered in the book are, nonetheless, the ones currently dominant in the discipline of literary studies.

Anyone expecting actual analysis of biblical texts need not turn to The Postmodern Bible. Instead, the book belongs to the now-dominant fashion in literary scholarship compendiously summed up by the formula "the triumph of theory." The primary texts for scholars in this movement are not works of literature but works of theory and criticism. Literary texts are useful only as a repository into which to dip for "proof texts" used to support generalizations about theory and culture. Frank Kermode—who has more recently lamented the full flowering of the very movement he helped to establish—sounded the keynote in his book The Genesis of Secrecy (1979), a harbinger of trends to come, when he acknowledged that "this book is about interpretation, an interpretation of interpretation." Another big-name critic concluded a discussion of the story of David and Bathsheba with the comment, "The real issue of the discussion was not the text but the critics" (Mieke Bal, Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories [1987]). For The Postmodern Bible, too, the Bible serves as the occasion for, rather than the subject of, discussion.

The Postmodern Bible is thus wrongly titled, since it tells us little about the Bible itself. What interests the authors is contemporary theory as applied to the Bible, and one can hardly improve on this book as a guide to current literary theory, which is systematically broken into its constituent parts, described, and critiqued. The 70-page bibliography is itself virtually definitive, nicely buttressed throughout the book by a copia of references to specific critical and theoretical texts. Whereas two decades ago one might legitimately have spoken about "the" literary approach to the Bible, the approaches surveyed in The Postmodern Bible—reader-response, structuralist/ narratological, poststructuralist, rhetorical, psychoanalytic, feminist/womanist, and ideological—show the pluralism that now prevails.

Despite that diversity, it is possible to ascertain the tendencies shared by current literary approaches to the Bible. Narrative is the preferred genre of analysis. In fact, literary approaches to the Bible are almost synonymous with an interest in biblical narrative to the relative neglect of other genres. A strong revisionist impulse drives the enterprise. The idea of producing alternate readings or counterreadings to the dominant reading is now fashionable. In a book that created a small scandal when it appeared in 1990 (The Book of J), Harold Bloom aspired to nothing less than "a reversal of twenty-five hundred years of institutionalized misreading" of the Old Testament, a feat that would require "a reading that is partly outside every normative tradition whatsoever." The dominant image for the scholar writing on the Bible is no longer the interpreter or travel guide but the jailbreaker, unlocking the prison house of conventional interpretations of the Bible and freeing those who have been enslaved by them. A principal aim of The Postmodern Bible is "to read against the grain of the biblical texts and the institution of biblical scholarship."

The comment about reading against the grain of biblical texts suggests that, in addition to resisting traditional interpretations of the Bible (and the methods on which they are based), current approaches also approach the biblical text itself with a hermeneutics of suspicion. A main thrust is to render biblical texts problematical—contradictory, filled with gaps that need to be filled by the ingenuity of the reader, obscure, opaque, indeterminate. One of the critics surveyed in The Postmodern Bible summarized what she had done with a biblical narrative thus: "It is an extremely sophisticated piece of literature. Embedded in a complex and, in its very complexity, problematic narrative structure, it is also an extremely sophisticated narrative unit. As an example as well of an extremely complex confusion of gender relations, it makes a case for a problematic of representation as related to gender" (Bal, Lethal Love). The key terms in this summary—sophisticated, complex, problematic, confusion—illustrate the myth of complexity that currently governs biblical interpretation. It leads to a distinct anti-didacticism as the Bible ceases to teach anything definite; indeed, it is often hard to see that biblical texts are about anything at all other than a scholar's theory. As I flounder in the alleged complexity of the Bible, I am reminded of C. S. Lewis's stricture against the humanists of the sixteenth century that they "lost the power … to respond to the central, obvious appeal of a great work."

The effect of the trends that I have noted is to desacralize a book that has traditionally been held by a majority of its readers to be an authoritative religious and moral guide to belief and conduct. Exactly how does one desacralize a sacred book? The answers that The Postmodern Bible provides include the following: by debunking traditional religious views of it; by wresting it from pious readers; by discussing it in specialized language and jargon understandable only by a coterie of academic initiates; by denying determinate meaning to it; by eliminating any presuppositions about the uniqueness of its origin and authority; by rendering it so complex that ordinary people cannot hope to understand it; by divesting it of didacticism and turning its study into an intellectual game; by replacing the traditional goal of interpreting the Bible with critiquing it (that is, denigrating many of the ideas about God and people espoused by the biblical writers, until it becomes obvious that many of the scholars writing on the Bible do not approve of it).

Whereas literary criticism of the Bible began as a methodology for describing and interpreting the Bible, in a volume like The Postmodern Bible it has become an ideology whose dominating ideas include a disbelief in the Bible's special status or authority, a distrust of traditional interpretations of it (especially by a believing community), skepticism about the ability of language to express determinate meaning, and a radical political-social agenda in the form of feminist and liberationist movements. The book itself answers any question we might have about how evangelical scholarship relates to the movement I have sketched by excluding it from its survey, except for a handful of published sources that are cited only to be used as whipping posts. Suppressed from view is a possibility that still flourishes in some circles, namely, literary criticism as a methodology for unfolding the form and content of the Bible.

A distinction made long ago by C. S. Lewis between receiving a text and using it remains a helpful framework for analyzing what is happening. To receive a text is to open oneself as fully as possible to what it says, whereas using it means to impose one's self and beliefs immediately on the work. In the words of Lewis, "The first demand any work … makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive." To obey the Bible as an authoritative word from God, along the lines of the Bible's formula "thus says the Lord," requires a stance of surrender. That such surrender is never absolute should not be allowed to obscure the high degree to which it can be done, nor how different the effect is compared to what happens when the Bible is made to fit an existing agenda.

The principle underlying many postmodern approaches to the Bible has been delineated by David Clines of the University of Sheffield (in The New Literary Criticism and the Hebrew Bible) as "customized interpretation." He explains:

If there are no "right" interpretations, and no validity in interpretation beyond the assent of various interest groups, biblical interpreters have to give up the goal of determinate and universally acceptable interpretations, and devote themselves to producing interpretations they can sell—in whatever mode is called for by the communities they choose to serve.

The Postmodern Bible customizes the Bible for various interest groups, with traditional Christians and Jews not among them.

Reading Biblical Narrative

Despite the triumph of theory over criticism, commentaries on biblical books of course continue to be written. When we turn to them, we find that ideas do, indeed, have consequences, and that current literary theory produces a predictable type of commentary. Compromising Redemption: Relating Characters in the Book of Ruth, by Danna Nolan Fewell and David Miller Gunn, may serve as a specimen. The book is part of Westminster John Knox's series Literary Currents in Biblical Interpretation, edited by Fewell and Gunn, who also jointly published two "weathervane" books in 1993—Gender, Power, and Promise: The Subject of the Bible's First Story and Narrative in the Hebrew Bible.

A revisionist impulse permeates their commentary on Ruth. The authors set out to subvert the traditional reading of the story as a pastoral idyll and idealized love story in which an exemplary couple is divinely favored for their loyalty, generosity, and love. The methodology on which the challenge to traditional readings rests is literary, with a focus on characterization. Before proceeding to commentary, the authors retell the story, based on a commendable literary conviction that "talking about a story is no substitute for actually telling it." The retelling, though, is a prosaic expansion of the biblical text in which the stylistic beauty and laconic terseness of the original are lost as the authors stack the interpretive deck before we even get to their commentary.

The commentary consists of three chapters, devoted respectively to Naomi, Boaz, and Ruth. In keeping with their avowed purpose to focus on what previous interpreters have missed, Fewell and Gunn spend most of their time exploring what they see as selfish motives instead of altruistic ones in the lead characters so that this story of redemption is "compromised" by suspect behavior. The cynicism emerges already in the listing of the story's "dramatis personae," where Boaz is described as someone who married Ruth in order to perpetuate the name and property of Mahlon, "or so he said."

One of the salient features of current literary approaches is that Freudian readings are much in vogue as critics see sexual overtones everywhere in the Bible. Compromising Redemption runs true to form. References in Boaz's speeches to vessels, drinking, and eating are "subliminal" sexual references. The "sheaves and grain can be seen as phallic." Ruth's request on the threshing floor that Boaz spread the skirt of his cloak over her pulls Boaz's religiosity "to the most basic level of human interaction—sexual intercourse."

In other ways, too, the heroic figures of tradition are cut down to size. Ruth's eloquent statement of loyalty to her mother-in-law in chapter 1 is said to belong to "a world of hyperbole, on the edge of the absurd." As for Ruth's loyalty itself, it "is not without mixed motives," nor is it "a love that recklessly loses sight of the self." The goal of Naomi's plan for the encounter on the threshing floor is "entrapment" of Boaz, the man of substance: "sexual intercourse, if not pregnancy, will enforce either marriage or a pay-off." Boaz, fearful that he may have had intercourse with Ruth in his inebriated state, is motivated to marry Ruth as much by a desire to protect his reputation as by a concern for Ruth.

Literary criticism can follow other paths than this, but here we find in microcosm the current state of literary criticism of the Bible: iconoclastic and subversive of traditional interpretations, debunking of received views of biblical characters and events, preoccupied with sex and with the human element in the Bible to the relative neglect of the divine.

A reviewer of Compromising Redemption spoke volumes about the current scene when he praised the authors for walking "the line with apparent ease between celebrating indeterminacy on the one hand and reading for ideological subversion on the other," and for giving us "a provocatively playful reading of the Book of Ruth."

Contemporary Literary Authors and the Bible

With the Bible enjoying celebrity status on the cultural scene, imaginative writers are turning to it as a seedbed for their creative efforts. A recent specimen is Walter Wangerin's The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel. The subtitle is a misnomer, since the book relies little on the novelistic staple of extensive realistic detail. The book instead preserves the spare, unembellished style of the Bible itself, smoothing out the plot line in the interests of clarity. Wangerin's retelling of the Bible's story highlights the master plot of salvation history, beginning with the call of Abraham and ending with the passion and resurrection of Jesus. One can see here the privileging of narrative (and more specifically plot) that dominates contemporary literary interest in the Bible.

Implicit in The Book of God is the working premise that the Bible would benefit from a reshaping of its format to fit the needs of a culture that lacks the tools to find its way with ease through the Bible as given. There is a case to be made for such a reshaping: the Bible is a kaleidoscope of varied genres, written by dozens of authors over many centuries. People whose education has allowed them to master this heterogeneous mass of material and to see its overall unity probably minimize how difficult it is for the common reader to experience the Bible as anything other than a collection of self-contained fragments.

The solution that Wangerin gives us is a literary one—to render the Bible instead of commenting on it and to smooth out the seams and rough edges into a continuous narrative flow. The result is a book for the common reader, unlike the academics' Bible sketched above. In another way, though, Wangerin's venture is in the mainstream with other contemporary approaches: it is willing to experiment with the Bible and defamiliarize it, offering us an alternative Bible—not in any sinister sense, but in the sense of a book discernibly different from the conventional Bible.

The Bible as it came down to us is a patchwork or mosaic of heterogeneous material and genres. Its narratives are collected cycles of stories, for example, not unified plots in the manner of the novel or short story. Technically, the Bible belongs to a recognizable genre—the anthology of diverse genres—but compared to modern anthologies it is more variegated, and its overall effect merits the epithet that biblical scholar C. H. Dodd pinned on the Gospel of Mark, "rather scrappy," when judged by classical aesthetic standards.

Faced with the difficulties posed by such a book, three responses have been forthcoming in our day. One is to allow the Bible to remain what it is for most readers—a collection of relatively self-contained units, with individual passages experienced mainly as daily devotional readings or the basis of Sunday sermons. A second response is to smooth out the rough places, and by selectivity and a uniform prose style make the Bible a continuous narrative, with nonnarrative parts of the Bible receding from sight. A third approach is that of traditional literary criticism: to accept the diversity and ancientness of the anthology as it has come to us but to give readers the critical tools of analysis and interpretation that will equip them to cope with individual texts and the book as a whole. The third approach remains truest to the Bible, though contemporary taste wants something more revolutionary.

The facet of the Bible that Wangerin's masterplot is designed to handle is its overabundance of diversity. Although Wangerin sometimes embellishes the biblical original with additional characterization or context, he is more likely to shorten the account, and in any case, The Book of God accepts as normative the Bible's prevailingly simple and cursory narrative style in which only the necessary details are included.

A complementary approach is represented by Frederick Buechner's novel Son of Laughter (1993), which works in the opposite direction of using the fictional imagination to elaborate the sparse details of the Genesis text. For Buechner, characterization is more interesting than plot, and the individual chapters of Son of Laughter are vignettes of characters and situations rather than stories built around a plot line having a beginning, middle, and end. Buechner prefers realism to idealizing; in contrast to Martin Luther's view that "we must not think that [the patriarchs of Genesis] are ordinary people but, next to Christ and John the Baptist, … the most outstanding heroes this world has ever produced," in Son of Laughter the patriarchs are ordinary, often caught in physical gestures and scenes that are unidealized and even sordid.

The publisher's blurbs on the books by Wangerin and Buechner are useful cultural pointers, whether or not they accurately represent the authors' intentions. Annie Dillard claims that Buechner has "breathed life" into the story of Jacob. An endorsement on the cover of Wangerin's book similarly claims that the author "has done us a great service by breathing life into the pages of the Old and New Testaments." Such statements accord with the movement I am surveying in this article—an assumption that the Bible is a problematic book that needs buttressing, elaboration, clarification, perhaps even transformation and rehabilitation if it is to be a vital force in contemporary life.

There is nothing pernicious in principle about wanting a fresh view of the Bible; the Bible itself enjoins us to sing a new song instead of being content with familiar forms. But gains in the form of fresh perspective are accompanied by an inevitable price tag. For readers who do not find the original lacking in vitality and imaginative force, the price tag naturally seems larger than for people who struggle with the Bible as given. For the former, John Steinbeck's quip after seeing a movie based on the Bible is likely to suffice: "Saw the movie, loved the book."

The Bible in Literature

A final spinoff from the new literary interest in the Bible is a revived interest in the Bible as a presence in Western literature. Anyone familiar with the history of English and American literature knows that the Bible is its single greatest source and influence, even in this century. What is new is the stature that imaginative writers are now accorded for their insights into the Bible. David Rosenberg, the editor of Genesis: As It Is Written(1996), a collection of pieces by contemporary novelists, poets, playwrights, and essayists, claims that such writers are better qualified than biblical scholars to explicate the Bible.

The result has been a burgeoning of anthologies (and again we can observe the communal aspect to current literary interest in the Bible). Rosenberg's 1989 anthology Congregation: Jewish Writers Read the Hebrew Bible spawned a companion volume, Incarnation: Contemporary Writers on the New Testament (1990), and in 1996 Rosenberg kept a good thing going with Communion: Contemporary Writers Reveal the Bible in Their Lives, which was preceded a year earlier by Out of the Garden: Women Writers on the Bible, edited by Christina Buchmann and Celina Spiegel. The insights that these collections of impressionistic essays provide into the Bible are not predominantly literary in nature, and this itself is significant: anything that can advertise itself as representing a literary view of the Bible itself, even if by way of book title or list of contributors, has immediate status.

More important than anthologies of essays by authors are anthologies of imaginative literature (chiefly poetry) based on material from the Bible. Among these are The Poets' Book of Psalms: The Complete Psalter as Rendered by Twenty-Five Poets from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries, edited by Laurance Wieder (1995), and two volumes edited by David Curzon: Modern Poems on the Bible: An Anthology (1994), and The Gospels in Our Image: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Poetry Based on Biblical Texts (1995). Preferable in range and quality of selections, though, is the two-volume Chapters into Verse: Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible, edited by Robert Atwan and Laurance Wieder. Though limited to short lyric poems, Chapters into Verse succeeds in conveying the beauty and vitality of imaginative literature based on the Bible. (A similar volume, Divine Inspiration: The Life of Jesus in World Poetry, edited by Robert Atwan, George Dardess, and Peggy Rosenthal, has just been published by Oxford University Press.)

One of the most helpful frameworks for making sense of poems rooted in the Bible was bequeathed by C. S. Lewis in a famous monograph entitled The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version (1950). It is the distinction between the Bible as a source and as an influence: "A source gives us things to write about; an influence prompts us to write in a certain way." Chapters into Verse naturally highlights poems that use the Bible as a source, accentuated by a format that prints biblical texts (in the King James translation) alongside the poems based on them.

The range of things that poets do when using the Bible as a source is part of the appeal of such poetry. Poets who use the Bible do as many as three things. Sometimes they use the Bible as a source of allusion, thereby elaborating the theme of their own work and potentially providing insight into the biblical text as well. They may also retell a biblical story or re-create a biblical moment, making it come alive in vivid imagined detail. Often, moreover, poets press beyond mere presentation to interpret a biblical story or character. Here their poetry becomes a source of biblical exegesis or midrash (as in the rabbinical embellishment of biblical material with imagined detail).

In all three instances, poets may write about biblical material as a way of expressing their own religious belief and experience (though a writer can be interested in the Bible for purely literary reasons—witness the comment of twentieth century playwright and fiction-writer Samuel Beckett that "I am aware of Christian mythology. … Like all literary devices, I use it where it suits me"). A poem that is unsurpassed in all these areas is one that was unfortunately not reprinted in Chapters into Verse (doubtless because of permissions hassles)—T. S. Eliot's great dramatic monologue "The Journey of the Magi," the first poem in which Eliot explored specifically Christian material after his public profession of faith.

Chapters into Verse is the only book discussed in this article that conspicuously reaches back from our own century to tap the Christian tradition of the past. The contrast between that tradition and the current cultural phenomenon of a literary Bible is obvious. The Bible of the believing Christian tradition is a Bible that is received as a sacred book, revered as the expression of God's truth and beauty, eliciting submission rather than manipulated in the service of a political or ideological program.

It is not the literary approach itself that is suspect. We have a long and distinguished history, from Caedmon's Hymn (the oldest extant work of Old English poetry) to T. S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi" and beyond, of literature that heightens our understanding of the Bible and devotion to its content. Literary methods of interpretation, too, are themselves old. Martin Luther not only gave the world a literary Bible in his vernacular translation—he also wanted as many young people as possible to study literature because he believed that "by these studies, as by no other means, people are wonderfully fitted for the grasping of sacred truth and for handling it skillfully."

The idea of the "the Bible as literature" is as old as the Bible itself inasmuch as its authors sometimes use technical generic labels for their works, sometimes show an awareness of literary conventions in surrounding cultures, and almost always display self-conscious craftsmanship in their writing (the writer of Ecclesiastes sounds the keynote when he speaks of arranging his composition "with great care" and searching for "words of delight").

Literary approaches to the Bible are still a viable option for Christian readers, scholars, and writers of imaginative literature. In principle, a literary study and appreciation of the Bible need not violate anything that a believing Christian asserts theologically about the Bible. Everything depends on the presuppositions with which one approaches the Bible as literature. The fact that in some circles the Bible as literature has been taken over by forces subversive of Christianity is no reason to abandon the venture itself. All it requires is that we read the cultural scene as Milton claimed we should view classical comedy—"with wariness and good antidote."

Leland Ryken is professor of English at Wheaton College.

Copyright © 1997 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.